As announced last night, A24, one of the biggest film production companies in the world, is making an SCP movie. Specifically, it is going to develop a sequel to the horror anthology series V/H/S called V/H/S: SCP, combining these two recognizable horror brands into what could be quite a good Halloween flick.
However, the SCP Foundation is taking a bit of issue with the matter, as A24 has not contacted or attempted to contact anyone on the website, especially since SCP is covered by a Creative Commons Attributions-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 3.0) license. This license means that A24’s film will be, essentially, in the public domain from the moment it is released, allowing anyone and everyone to copy it and distribute it freely without paying anyone a single penny.
As the Foundation’s staff indicates, “A24 does not and cannot have any exclusive rights to anything related to the SCP Foundation, including any films that Spooky Pictures or anyone else may choose to create.”
“The “ShareAlike” aspect means that creators of derivative works are obligated to release those works under CC BY-SA 3.0 or higher as well,” the staff wrote.
Based on this, the SCP Foundation outlined that A24 “would not be permitted to distribute the film with DRM or other effective technological measures that would prevent it from being copied.” This means that, as indicated above, reproduction, copying, and redistribution – without paying or attributing anything to A24 itself – would be completely legal for anyone.
Furthermore, A24 “would not be able to establish any sort of exclusivity with respect to distribution. Just as anyone who follows the license can redistribute and create derivative works based on the SCP Foundation articles on our wiki, anyone will be able to do the same with their film. For example, anyone could upload a copy to YouTube.”
As the Foundation explains, this is the exact reason why no Hollywood film based on SCP was ever made. Big corporations absolutely love the idea of IPs and copyright, but under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, they would simply have no legal means to copyright their own film, which would lead to, say, Netflix producing an SCP show that HBO, in turn, could freely distribute on its own streaming service without paying Netflix anything.
Most SCP games are also free for this exact reason.
Even theaters would have the freedom to make full copies of the film and play it without payment or permission from A24. That’s the beauty of creative liberty and collaboration, but A24 could potentially fight this.
After all, the company did issue waves of strikes and DMCA takedown requests against various Backrooms derivations after it made its own film on the subject. Like the Backrooms, the SCP Foundation has its origins in random 4chan posts. They were never meant to be IPs, and they aren’t, but A24’s past behavior doesn’t inspire hope.
Additionally, though the SCP Foundation did fight a copyright war with one person abusing the license in Russia, it’s hard to expect crowdfunding to be enough to fight a multi-billion-dollar enterprise in the United States. Of course, A24 could be nice about it and meet with the SCP Foundation, but anything outside of agreeing to the terms above (quite hard for a profit-oriented company) could prove a major blow to the project as a whole.
